This one is bizzare, not only European pilots on average have less experience than US ones, but they are not allowed to gain experience by corporate policy.
(This one coming from a country where aviation is a big mess)
Automation complacency or simply being out of practice can have significant repercussions in emergencies.
Consider a task where humans have a marginally higher error rate than the autopilot. Obviously, per task, the safe thing to do is to let the autopilot fly.
But now consider a more difficult scenario where the autopilot just bails out, e.g. due to ILS being inoperable, wind shear, any kind of non-permissible sensor discrepancy on board etc. – how would you like be on a plane flown by a pilot that has never done a manual landing in the past few months or even years due to company policy?
Of course, a night approach at a foreign airport might not be the best opportunity to practice a manual landing (and it looks like the planned arrival time was during daylight hours!), but as a general policy, allowing some manual flying seems like a very good safety practice, at least until autopilots can fly and land in 100% of all scenarios.
For me, a training flight is a flight that is written with appropriate "exercise" number into logbook and is part of the official training program. These days most airlines do those on simulators, and they will include "rarer" operations like rarely used approaches (2xNDB instead of ILS, how to fly DME arc approach, etc), instrument failures, and so on.
You do not do such flights with passengers, because you're intentionally lowering the safety level.
In addition to that, there's a recommendation to randomly, given safe conditions, do regular manual operations. Mind you, those SOPs probably explicitly say "do not experiment after long haul flight".
I might have been a bit more cross because people have died (including in ways that impacted me) because of organizations that mixed "training" and "passenger" flights.
If a pilot only ever trained visual approaches in sim, and not the real world accounting for the overwhelming majority of their flight experience, that number would be meaningless.
Thus somewhat mixed reading of what I wrote earlier. Was obvious to me, from responses wasn't obvious to others.
We should be testing in non-production environments, but non-prod is not the same as production, so it is inevitable that you will be testing a system change when you deploy to prod. If your non-prod environment is similar enough that there are NO system changes when you deploy to prod ... then your non-prod env is actually prod, because that would mean that your non-prod network routing, auth, and database are the same as prod, because changing any one of those would be a system change.
> Visual landings are only disallowed at night
I don't agree with the rest of what he said... but he actually has a valid point here. Emergencies happen at night too, and sometimes the nature of the emergency will make an instrument approach impossible.
Can you provide more details?
